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Hunter Gatherer
Between Fairbanks and Circle Alaska
Early humans gathered available food from the forest. Today, there are some things that can still only be gathered, such as certain types of mushrooms. In northern Alaska, morels live among the roots of the trees. Morels are a mycelium – the main part of the organism lives underground in tiny webs near the roots of the host tree. When it is time to reproduce, or if the tree dies, the mycelium produces a mushroom in order to release spores and to go find other living trees. After fire burns, when large areas of trees have been killed by fire, there will often be mushroom blooms, including the valuable and highly-sought morels. Morel mushrooms are very difficult to cultivate and are most efficiently gathered in the wild. When large forest fires in devastated Alaska in 2004 , large morel blooms followed in 2005. Like a modern day goldrush, vanloads of “shroomers” from all over the Pacific Northwest converged on northern Alaska, to gather and load up mushrooms. Pickers can earn as much as $8.00 a pound on the wholesale market and wild stories abound of brutal turf wars between rival groups of hunters in the forest.